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John Fund

It’s not completely clear why Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition, which he created in the wake of Obama’s election, has decided to hold an annual conference in Washington, D.C. After all, the conservative Christian voters his group works to identify and mobilize already have the Values Voter Summit, the much larger fall event sponsored by the Family Research Council and a gaggle of other right-wing groups.

One reason may be for the once-disgraced Reed to show off his political access: last week’s Road to Majority conference was thick with Republican officeholders and presidential wannabes, and I lost count of how many times Reed told participants how impressed they should be by the lineup. For the lobby day that preceded the conference itself, he was able to get face time for his participants with Religious Right and Tea Party heroes from the Senate -- Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, and Marco Rubio – and House of Representatives – Louis Gohmert, Steve King, and David Jolly – along with “establishment” Republicans like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Sen John Cornyn.

In fact, the conference may be seen by Reed as a way for him to play peacemaker among the sometimes warring factions within the Republican Party and encourage unity going into the election year. At last year’s conference, RNC head Reince Priebus had a chance to tell attendees, many of them skeptical, that he was indeed one of them, as a Christian and a conservative; this year he made an appearance via video.

Last Saturday, on panel on the 2014 elections, conservative pundit and author John Fund predicted that Thad Cochran would be defeated by Chris McDaniel. Fund said it would mark a second “humiliating defeat” for the Republican establishment (after Eric Cantor’s stunning primary loss) and should lead to a demand from the grassroots for McConnell and Boehner to work out a “peace treaty” with Tea Party activists so they could stop spending an “insane” amount of resources on internal fights. “The real enemy is in November,” he said.

Of course that’s not what happened on Tuesday. With a boost from the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the Chamber of Commerce, and ads by football great Brett Favre – and more notably with a direct appeal to African American voters – Cochran squeaked out an unexpected victory.

There is nothing dangerous or extreme about defending the Constitution and the civil liberties therein. And there’s nothing strange at all about standing as people of faith for a country that WE built, that WE believe in. But there is something a bit strange, there is something a bit unusual, about a Republican primary that’s decided by liberal Democrats.”

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“This is not the party of Reagan,” he declared. “But we’re not done fighting. And when we’re done it will be. We have fought too long we have fought too hard to have a voice in this party. And today, the conservative movement took a back seat to liberal Democrats in the state of Mississippi. In the most conservative state in the republic, this happened. If it can happen here, it can happen anywhere. And that’s why we will never stop fighting.”

National Review’s Eliana Johnson, who moderated the 2014 panel, said the Establishment / Tea Party split has been vastly overblown by the media slapping the Tea Party label on every gadfly challenger. But on the night of Cochran’s Democratic-voter-assisted victory, Sarah Palin was talking about a third party.

For those of us outside the movement, who see the overlapping Tea Party and Religious Right movements relentlessly pushing the GOP further to the right, it can be hard to understand why there is so much anger directed at the establishment. After all, it’s not as if Eric Cantor and Thad Cochran are some kind of liberal Rockefeller Republicans.

But even these conservative leaders are not enough for grassroots activists who imbibe a steady ideological diet, from right-wing media and movement leaders, calling for a radically limited federal government and viewing compromise made in the process of governing as complicity with tyranny. Republican leaders who encouraged an angry grassroots uprising against the “tyranny” of health care reform are now reaping the whirlwind.

If there were a unifying message from Ralph Reed’s conference, it was, “America is in decline and the world is going to hell and it’s all Obama’s fault.” The solution offered was a combination of spiritual and political warfare. While right-wing groups have a common enemy in the White House, and will certainly work together this year to try to give Republicans control of the Senate, it is clear that we haven’t yet seen the end of the struggle over just how far to the far right the Republican Party will be pushed.

As the Senate Judiciary Committee holds a hearing today on the nomination of civil rights attorney Debo Adegbile to head the Justice Department’s civil rights division, Republican senators are facing pressure from right-wing activists to sink his nomination.

Conservatives have not been fans of the civil rights division under the leadership of President Obama and Attorney General Holder, who installed now-Labor Secretary Tom Perez to restore the division to its original purpose after neglect under the Bush administration. In other words, President Obama has nominated civil rights advocates to the office and encouraged them to enforce civil rights measures….which is just too much for some conservative activists to bear.

Leading the charge against Adegbile and the division he’s been nominated to head is J. Christian Adams, a former Bush administration Justice Department official whose “claim to fame as a federal lawyer,” according to The Atlantic’s Andrew Cohen , “seems to be his penchant for accusing black people of discriminating against whites.”

Since Holder took over the Justice Department, Adams has dedicated himself to stirring up racial panic over the civil rights division’s work. It was Adams who drove the conservative media freakoutover the New Black Panther Party. He has also been an active voice in opposing the Holder Justice Department’s increased efforts to protect voting rights and testified before Congress against a meaningful restoration of the Voting Rights Act after its decimation at the hands of the Supreme Court.

Adams even wrote a book called Injustice: Exposing The Racial Agenda Of The Obama Justice Department, which dwells on the New Black Panther story and accuses the Obama DOJ of “insisting on kids’ rights to attend school dressed as transvestites” and a “fixation on racial grievance” which the book claims “threaten[ed] the integrity of the 2012 elections.” In the book, Adams accuses Holder and his civil rights team of seeking “payback” against whites and of supporting efforts to “switch the positions of historic oppressor and the historically oppressed.”

So, naturally, Adams has taken the lead in opposing Adegbile’s nomination to head the civil rights division, since from his record it seems that Adegbile would actually use the position to enforce civil rights. Adegbile, a child of immigrants, had astint as a child actor on Sesame Street before putting himself through school and ultimately landing in a top position at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

It is Adegbiles’ work at the LDF work that Adams and his allies have jumped on. In a post on Pajamas Media in November, Adams attacked the LDF as “an organization that has pushed a radical racial agenda including attacks on election integrity measures, opposition to criminal background checks for hiring, and racial hiring quotas for state and local governments” -- in other words, support for voting rights, “ban the box” measures , and some affirmative action measures.

Adams has succeeded in recruiting a raft of conservative activists to his anti-Adegbile cause, including The National Review’s John Fund, who also attacked the nominee for his defense of the Voting Rights Act; former FEC commissioner and voter suppression advocate Hans Von Spakovsky, who told NPR that Obama had failed to “nominate someone who believes in race-neutral enforcement of our discrimination laws”; The Daily Caller, which accused Adegbile of “a radical record on racial issues”; and FrontPage Magazine, which called the nomination evidence of the president’s “ anti-American radicalism.”

The key phrase in Adams’ attack on Adegbile is his characterization of the Obama Justice Department as pushing “nakedly racialist policies” – “racialism” being Adams’ preferred code for the acknowledgement that race and racism still impact American life, an acknowledgment that is critical to the civil rights divisions’ work.

It’s clear that what right-wing activists object to is not so much Adegbile himself, but the fact that he would ably lead a division that is aggressively working to protect voting rights and fight housing and employment discrimination, a division that acknowledges that discrimination is still a reality in the United States.

Leading up to what promises to be a very close presidential election, the Right has been working hard to lay the groundwork for blaming an Obama victory on “voter fraud.” The same strategy worked wonders last time around, when, one year after President Obama’s decisive victory a full half of Republicans believed that the community organizing group ACORN had stolen the election. In-person voter fraud, as John McCain strategist Steve Schmidt admitted today, is a convenient part of “the mythology now in the Republican Party,” one that as Josh noted earlier has helped to fuel decades of voter suppression measures.

At an Eagle Forum conference in September – attended by Todd Akin, among others – two speakers addressed the issue of voter fraud: Catherine Engelbrecht, whose group True the Vote has been challenging registered voters across the country, and John Fund, a conservative columnist and author of a recent book on the issue.

Fund claimed that President Obama wants the election to go to the Supreme Court, and that in a close election, the president would use the now-defunct ACORN to change the outcome: “The election is close, and he puts his thumb on the scale of democracy, and he sends his old ACORN friends the signal, you know what’s going to happen.”

After Engelbrecht’s speech, Schlafly joined her on stage to share news she had heard from “somebody” that in Pennsylvania, “at two o’clock in the afternoon they have no Republican observer, the Democrats just vote [for] the rest of the people who haven’t voted.”